I remember in elementary school, I had a lot of teachers who were really wonderfull and loving and did a lot of good for me. However, I've also had some teachers who really traumatised me. I remember in 4th grade, I had a teacher who was thoroughly convinced that I was a lesbian, and asked me to stop. Forget the fact that 4th graders don't know what their sexuality is yet, and I'm not a lesbian even now, but that's not one of those things you can just stop! And why would you ask someone that? I had never misbehaved in class before having this teacher, but in 4th grade, I spent more time out in the hall than inside the classroom. I don't know why, she just brought out the worst in me. I remember once, she grabbed my arm and pushed me out in the hall. I, being the smartass that I am, shouted "You know, I'm not going to get a very good education standing out here!" Then she slammed the door on me. I really liked my 5th grade teacher. Too bad the teacher I had before her made me so cynical about teachers. My 5th grade teachers was very kind to me, I just didn't trust teachers at that point. This distrust carried me into high school until 10th grade, where I had a really amazing teacher who just snapped me out of it. I should probably write him and tell him that. I'm just curious about hearing about grammer school teachers from the point of view of a parent. Did your kids ever have teachers that you yourself were really impressed with? Any teachers that you wanted to or even did take your kids out of their class? Why?
My daughter had one teacher who was horrible. He would say things like, "That's pretty good, for a girl." One day she had had it with him and called him a misogynist pig. He kicked her out of school until she wrote a letter of apology. She was suspended for 3 days. She wrote a letter apologizing for disrespecting him as an adult and for disrespecting his position as her teacher. She then said that she would not apologize for calling him a misogynist pig because he was and he needed to stop treating the girls in the classroom the way he was. I signed the letter after she did. They had to let her back in school because she apologized. But he never let up on her. He mistreated all the girls. it took several phone calls to the principal and superintendent of schools to get this man's attitude changed. Kathi
In 8th grade, (2001, the year of 9/11), I had a math teacher from Afghanistan. He was tall and bald and middle-eastern looking, had an accent, and was very strict and boring... I saw him smile maybe about once every 3 months, if even that much. He actually went around with a severe "upside-down smile" type frown on his face. His classes were like frozen, nobody ever talked. Except sometimes kids couldn't help but act rude, because it was just so funny to see his reaction. Like one kid was like "Mr. Aslamy, do you do drugs?", (and then the class giggled), and he was like "Would you ask your father that question? Because I know my son would NEVER ask me that." and the kid was like "I asked my dad once, he said yes." He used to do things like explain something on the board, and then say something like "Now for those of you too stupid to understand this,..." and then he'd explain it in a different way. One time a kid in one of his classes slipped up and called him "Mr. Afghanistan". When I heard that, I thought, it would be sooo funny if somebody accidentally called him "Mr. Osama". Behind his back he was "Mr. Asshole". I heard that over the past three years he's become much less uptight about stuff and is laughing and smiling more in class. Good for him.
Misogyny: Noun Hatred of women: "Every organized patriarchal religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny" -Robin Morgan Etymology Greek M*soguni* : M*so-, miso- + gun, woman; see Gyny A misogynist is someone who hates women.
oh yeah! now if i could just narrow it down to ONE story! but my fault i'm sure, my boys went to a public school with a sign on the driveway that said "busses only" - what could i have expected? they survived though, and are doing exceptionally well this year in a very difficult private school (thanks grandma!)
my most hated teacher was my knitting&crocheting teacher from 5th-7th grade. I have to say before, that I come from a family who is really great in these things, my grandma has a wool store, and so does my mom. So It's kinda in my genetics that I am (and was able before that damn class) to knit, crochet, stich, and whatever other technique there is. So that teacher. In her class, it was more silent then in math. If someone would even whisper, she'd scream the hell out of her (girls school). So every session, (once a week, doubleperiod thursday morning, urrrrghh) we had to show her our work, what we have done over the week, and since the last time we showed it. well, we didn't have to do anything, over the week, only if we wanted to. but: if we forgot our stuff at home, that just happens, we had to sit silent on our chairs and do nothing. No reading, no studying, nothing. just stare at the front. In order to show her our stuff, we had to line up. Not directly behind her desk, because we could cough or sneeze, and she would get sick. So there had to be a 1.5 m break between her and the person on call, and the ones in line. Kind of like in post offices and banks, that yellow line.... However, there was also an end of line, a shelf and if you stood behind that, you had to sit down again, because the line was too long, and you shouldn't waste your time standing in line. If you did something wrong, she'd pull the wool, and "unknit" (don't know the words here sorry...) everything. Yes, this is the way you do things like that, but you could do it more polite.... She seemed to hate everyone. besides some. But she hated me. Oh yes. I could knit before, and I didn't have to buy her crappy acrylic wool, because I got cool real cotton or sheep wool, from my mom or grandma. In really fancy colors. I knew tricks she didn't know. WEll, I was afraid of that class every thursday. I even wanted to make the effort to be taken out of that class, because I knew how to do most of the things she'd teach. But no success. 'Well, I ended up never wanting to knit again. :-( But, in 10th grade, I started again, and love it! No classes with that crap of course, but on my own. But be stupid to not do it, if the material is so close and always for free right? I just have to lend them my stuff for exhibition, and then I get it back.
My third grade teacher Ms. Millie was not mentally stable and at the time I hated her for it. She routinely would show up an hour late for school while the next door teacher covered for her and offer no excuse. About midway through the year, I told my mother about it, and she didn't believe me. I had to get a friend on the phone to convince her. My mom offered Ms. Millie a deal: If she was going to be late to school, she could give my mother a call and Mom would sit in for her. Well, to keep her little lie going, she'd ask my mom in sporadically while still missing the majority of morning hours, so my mom wouldn't check on my story. (This really angered me as a kid.) This isnt the weirdest part. Until Ms. Millie's class, I'd always been a straight A student. She would do things while grading papers like write down an 87 in her grade book, call me over and say, "Why don't I just curve this?" and scribble down a 93 over it. When I told my mom about it, then the most interesting lie cropped up, similar to feministhippy's situation: Ms. Millie always liked her shoulders rubbed and would ask various students to do it. She told my mother I was a lesbian (I was nine) and I would stand behind her and masturbate (I was nine) while I rubbed her shoulders. It's not that she wanted to cause alarm, but she was "scared the other kids would make fun of" me. For whatever reason, my mother believed her and our relationship was tense for years to follow. Ms. Millie died in her forties of breast cancer, and I can honestly consider that maybe she kind of deserved it. BTW, she got fired from her job at school before that and had to teach at the adult learning center.
My seventh grade home economics teach sounds like your knitting teacher. I had been sewing since I can remember. So when I took home ec, I tried to show her better and simpler ways to do things. She got so upset with me because I knew tricks she hadn't thought of. I almost failed that class. Kathi
Bear with me folks, I am about to vent. In sixth grade, 2 months into the year my teacher decided that he wanted to work with younger kids, so he just left. We had sub after sub for the rest of the year. Nobody wanted to stay with us. One of the subs who came more than once used to stand on her desk and yell. In seventh grade I was really sick, so the teacher gave my locker number and combination to someone so that she could bring my books to me. He read it to her in front of the whole class as she sat at her desk. When I returned to school my locker was open, empty, and vandalized. I was new at that school. I was the new hippy city kid in Redneckville. The little rednecks, unfortunately, had found my journal in my locker. They follwed me around the campus reading pages of it to me very loudly, mocking me and teasing me. I told the teacher what had happened, and that some of my textbooks and schoolwork were gone. He didn't apologize or give me credit for the missing work. Dickhead. In ninth grade my history teacher announced on the first day of school, in a large public school, that he was a born again Christian, but he would try not to let that affect his grading. I kid you not. So, eventually we had to write a research paper. None of the things that I was interested in were mentioned in our textbook. At that time my mom was studying to be a teacher at a very progressive university. She was reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. So was I. (This was before the internet, folks, I had limited resources to use for my paper.) So, I told the teacher that even though they weren't mentioned in the textbook, I wanted to write about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and their work to make it so American women could vote. Fine. The second part of the paper was suppsed to be about why I admired these people. I said that I admired them because they fought for equal rights and I felt that women, and everyone else, should have equal rights. I said it's not democracy if women can't vote. That teacher gave me a bad grade and said that I thought like a Nazi. He refused to explain what he meant by that. I was very upset. I'm 31 now, so that was...let's see...17 years ago and I still don't know what he meant. Dork. Thank you for letting me vent. I am pleased to say that this year for the first time my kids have teachers that are respectful and seem gifted in their field. Thank goodness. As a few people might remember, I had major problems with their ignorant teachers last year. I have a couple of good stories, too, though. My second highschool was an alternative one in Madison, Wisconsin. My English teachers got me tickets to see Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, Ntozake Shange, and other authors read their own work at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. So, I really benefitted from that. We read books like Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. It was great. Once I had to research a decade in the 20th century in U.S. culture and give a presenattion about it. I drew the 1960s out of a hat, no kidding. It turned out that I had used the same resources as the other person who did the 1960s and she gave her presentation first. So the teacher, who knew that I had lived in intentional communities including The Farm, let me talk about that and answer people's questions, as someone who grew up in the counterculture that sprang out of the sixties. That was cool. Finally being a freak was advantageous in school. I feel better now.
I had the best teachers for Ele and grammer school!! I was homeschooled so I had Me Ma and Pa but High schools was a nightmare for me. My geography teacher was this nasty self rightous ****, this is how I precived her to be back then. well damn it all to hell if now I don't look back on those classes with her and think that she was a great teacher she prepared us so much for University. Life was 10X's easier because Ms. Braun was a hard ass!
I went to school in the 60s, when Corporal Punishment was legal in our state. I remember kids getting hit by teachers. I got my hair pulled by a 1st grade teacher (who my parents loved and they wouldn't believe me when I told them she hit kids.) She once put a little girl who used to cry all the time (didn't every class have that little girl) in front of the sink in the bathroom, filled the sink with water and told her if she didn't stop crying, she would put her head under the water. Scary shit.
The principal, who made my dd Sunshine's life so HARD when she was diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome, got fired last year, and led out of the building by security. There was some kind of sex scandel and we NEVER got the details on it. The prick deserved being taken out of that school in handcuffs. This guy so SO obsessed with "gangs" (we don't really have gangs in the county I live in, but this guy probably created them, just with his paranoia) Moon was in 6th grade and had a sweatshirt with a picture of a crown on it and the word Princess. He made her put masking tape on the crown, because "crowns are gang symbols." I also found out that he was a PHYS ED MAJOR in college. And HE was the prinicpal. Those who can't teach....teach PE.
In my grade 11 year I moved up to an isolated little town up north. It must have been hard to get teachers up there, cause the gym teacher was also the art and drama teacher. He took a two week course and "poof" he was an art teacher. I knew more than he did! He would often stomp out of class when we tried to show initiative or creativity and deviate from his plan. My english teacher wsa fresh out of college, not much older than some of her students. When she discovered that I was dating her ex boyfriend ( I was 18, he was 25), my grades started to slip. I would have failed, but I aced my final with 98% and talked to the principal. The english teacher was fired that day, and I heard that the gym/art/drama teacher was fired the next year because of his tantrums. I have more horror stories, but these were the worst. My daughter is now homeschooled, here is the reason why: Skylah came home with lice 4 times in 4 months. Each time she had them, I kept her home for a week, cleaned and combed her hair until they were gone. I'd send her to school lice free, and she would come home with lice again and again! After talking to other parents, I found out that one girl had lice for the last 6 months! The teachers knew, but were not doing anything about it. At one time 19 out of 23 students were absent because of lice. When I tried to talk to the principal about it, he basically said if the parents send the child to school, he can not send the child home. What the..? Can we say "health issue'? So I pulled her out of school, and started homeschooling. Public school...what a nightmare!
yuck - lice my boy's school was infested with it, they caught it more times than i care to remember. i finally just shaved their heads, i couldn't afford lice shampoo every week. they got their progress reports yesterday, amazingly my boys (12 & 10 yo) who were making straight f's are now on the honor roll. thanks grandma! my mom's paying for them to go to private school this year, and it's a LOT harder than any public school - but they love it. go figure. hopefully i'll get to homeschool the baby - my hubby is convinced that he's gonna make that happen.
In high school, I mostly had really great teachers, especially English teachers. My 10th grade English teacher was really encouraging in my writing and really made me feel good about it. I never had that before. He really made me understand that A- I am a good writer after all and B- Not all teachers lie. That was a really problem with me. We all go thru a rebellious stage where we think adults are all full of crap- that's a normal part of life. Teenagers who don't ever fell like that scare me. But I had been going thru that stage since I was 8. I did what I was told, I mean, but I was really cynical and assumed that all adults lied about pretty much everything. So to an extent, he restored my faith in adults. He was somewhat effeminate, and had said that he wasn't married, so there were a lot of rumors going around that he was gay. I don't know, and I'm not sure I care. But you know how high school kids can be. He was also a nice guy who wouldn't take a lot of crap, so the students assumed he was passive aggressive and hated him for that. He wasn't passive aggressive. He was a nice guy who wouldn't take a lot of crap. One of my 12 grade English teachers was really awesome, too. I took his mythology and theater classes (they were both part of the English program at my high school). He was more than a little bit eccentric, and so a lot of other students didn't like him. I liked him a lot. I can't possibly express how much I learned from him. And he taught me stuff that was interesting, too. Part of what I didn't like about high school is that half of the stuff I learned there I could've learned at the library, and the books usually had better answers to my questions. Yeah, most of the things he taught me I could've learned elsewhere, but he made it seem important and interesting. And he had better answers to my questions than the book did. He's a chronic teacher, too. Every so often I see him at the mall and talk to him, and he'll always want to tell me something interesting about history or life or anything. He does that to adults, too. It's really funny, actually. In 10th grade, I had a really shitty math teacher, though. Okay, that's not fair. He really worked well for some people. He was the kind of teacher who made fun of you when you got the answer wrong. And he was just teasing, of course, but math is not my best subject, and I screwed up a lot. That was already embarrassing enough. Him making jokes at me and everyone laughing made it pretty misrable. Because understand that in 10th grade I was a really, really oversensitive person. If he did that now, I would laugh along, and maybe even make jokes along with him. But it really bothered me then. So I talked to him about that. But when I explained it, he just rolled his eyes and said I was acting like a baby and to "get over it". And he kept making those jokes everytime I screwed up. I tried to get out of his class, but all the other math classes were full and you're not supposed to switch out of a class just because you don't like the teacher, anyway. I understand that rule, and why it's there, but there are situations where problems with your teacher do make it harder for you to learn.
My friend and I got a teacher kicked out of the school once. Not fired, but they pretty much cornered him and forced him into retirement. He was really horrible. He taught voice when we were in 10th grade (10th grade was a really eventful year for me, looking back). We were in two different classes. He used to badmouth my class to the other class, saying how poor singers we were and how rude we were. We weren't rude, and we sang perfectly fine for a high school voice class. There were some great singers, there were some average singers. Mostly we had above average singers who would never reach fame for our singing, but sounded good in a room of people who weren't trained No terrible singers. He treated my friends class like crap, constantly humiliating them, and told us how wonderful they were. Obviously, they were scared to death of him. My friend had a migraine in class, and he screamed at her for not singing. (which must've really been painful if with a migraine) Her friend got kicked out of class for talking- before the bell rang. Catch that? The class didn't even start yet. I got in trouble for not singing while Amnesty International was observing the Day of Silence promoting gay rights. He humiliated me. I was at the point of crying (and I don't cry in front of people. It's not my nature. If I have to cry, I hold it in and wait till I get to the bathroom. But I couldn't this time. I was too embarrassed) and when one of the boys came to comfort me, he yelled at him! So it just came to the point where he was too busy yelling at us for things that most people would be at least a little understanding about to actually do a good job teaching, so that finally we went to our Assistant Principal to try and get something done about this. Well, apparently, This was not the first time people complained about him, and as it turned out, he had been warned that if there were any more problems, he'd told that if he didn't retire, he'd be fired. So our complaints were pretty much the last straw. He was really upset about being asked to leave. I have no regrets.
i dunno how it is in your state, but here in florida you can go to the courthouse and look at anyone's file at the county clerks office. everything is a matter of public record - which makes it easy if you're investigating potential babysitters, etc. i've never just looked up anyone, but there are times in retrospect that i probably should have.
